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Conservation is the deepest constraint in physics: energy is neither created nor destroyed. The same law governs cash flow (every dollar on a balance sheet came from somewhere), circuit analysis (current in equals current out at every node), and server economics (every request consumes a CPU cycle that could have gone elsewhere).
The balance beam is the universal metaphor. Energy flows into one pan, flows out of the other, and the beam stays level. When inflow exceeds outflow by a critical margin, the beam tips — but conservation does not bend. The energy does not disappear. It accumulates somewhere it was not meant to: in unreleased software, in debt instruments, in heat.
A system that appears to violate conservation has merely hidden the imbalance. The hidden side always surfaces.
Real conservation failures: Enron (cash inflow from new investors paid old investors — energy printed from nothing, until it stopped), the 2008 housing crisis (risk that was supposedly hedged was not hedged), and any server that OOMs after a memory leak (memory allocated was never freed).